In February the Central Bank of Bangladesh was the victim of a cyber-heist that resulted in $81 million in losses and another $850 million in halted transactions.

In July, the Democratic National Committee’s email servers were breached. The resulting leaked emails caused much embarrassment and lead to the resignations of some of the organizations key officials.

In September, Yahoo announced that half a billion of its users’ accounts were hacked back in 2014 thus gaining access to names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of births, and in some cases, even security questions and answers. This event alone exposed 500 million people to potential identity theft.

In October,major websites went down due to a massive attack on one of the backbones of the internet; thus leaving Twitter, PayPal, Spotify and many businesses hosted by Amazon Web Services unable to function.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, the San Francisco rail system was hacked allowing riders to ride for free while a hacker held the system hostage with the use of Ransomware.

Most recently, Google announced that upwards of 1 million user accounts were compromised with the use of “Googlian” malware on Android-powered smartphones. The company warns that 13,000 additional devices are being infected every day.

Most small business owners believe cyberattacks are the concern of large corporations, however nothing could be further from the truth. According to Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 71% of cyberattacks occur at businesses with less than 100 employees. [1]

Unfortunately, many “SMBs suffer from 'It can't happen to us' syndrome,” notes Robert Siciliano, security expert for McAfee. “They also typically don't have the resources to secure their networks to the degree a large enterprise would. But the information on their networks – and access to their bank accounts – still makes them a big target.” Even though it turns out SMB’s have a larger target on their backs than they realize, two thirds of SMBs surveyed by Symantec say they're not concerned about cyber threats; and more than 80 percent have no formal cyber security plan.

Cybersecurity is one of the most important things to worry about when it comes to business IT operations. With the advent of the "Cryptolocker" and the other Ransomware viruses that have become prevalent since September 2013 the potential for loss is at an all-time high. Not only do these new ransomware viruses lock up the system, they also encrypt the files. This ensures that businesses pay even if the malware was deleted. So now you have to worry about the cost from downtime while locked up and the loss of critical data, as well as the additional cost of the "Ransom" the hackers demand to unlock them. The "Ransom" collected has been estimated to be in the tens of millions. Call us today at 512-343-8891 x2 to find out how to protect yourself and your business assets.

HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, has been a term of concern for the past few years for every healthcare provider and individual. Congress enacted HIPPA in 1996 to ensure the efficiency and standardization of healthcare as well as to enhance access to healthcare. What most business owners do not know is that HIPAA affects everyone. HIPAA affects those within education, non-profits, private practices, major corporations and even the government.

It was earlier this month that the database of America’s second largest health insurance company, Anthem, was cyber hacked. The hackers were able to gain over 80 million records, making this the largest data hack of any U.S. health insurance company. The breach included emails, birthdays, social security numbers, employment information as well as home addresses. The good news is that the hack did not pull financial information such as bank account and credit card numbers. The bad news is that Anthem customers are now subject to not only identity theft but tax fraud.

Your identity has quite a lot of value, especially in the wrong hands. Security firm ZoneAlarm put together some numbers in 2011 concerning identity fraud, and it even shocked us. Let's talk about a few of these statistics and what it means.

Email is (and has been) a prime method of communication for businesses of all sizes. With email comes a whole slew of issues that are essentially synonymous with the technology; spam, information overload, phishing, and information privacy. Even Central Texas small businesses that only do business locally are at risk of these issues. Personal email accounts are equally at risk. Employing proper precautions and practices whenever communicating via email is very important to prevent the risk of security compromises, monetary loss, and even legality issues.

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Capstone Works, Inc. is proud to announce the launch of our new website at http://www.capstoneworks.com. The goal of the new website is to make it easier for our existing clients to submit and manage support requests, and provide more information about our ser...